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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29348700">Reverse Shot</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/NUKANotUserKnownAs/pseuds/NUKANotUserKnownAs'>NUKANotUserKnownAs</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Silent Hill (Video Game Series), Silent Hill 4 - Fandom</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>I do not cosign any of this, Likely to remain uncompleted and unedited, Other, Possibly bad, SUBJECT TO CHANGE, Slow Burn, WIP</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 13:40:38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,237</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29348700</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/NUKANotUserKnownAs/pseuds/NUKANotUserKnownAs</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry Townsend has a fan.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Reverse Shot</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>So, what do we have?</p><p>He was the lone example of his kind. I have no choice but to explain what I mean by this, limited though I am by prose, comically mismatched with what I need to describe - that is, photographs; he was a photographer.</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span class="u"><b>I. 0205200.gif - "Highway"</b> </span>
</p><p>
<em>An arc of highway forms a crown, above a lake, above a town. A curtain of milk-gray haze is drawn across all the exhausting colors of this landscape, muting them. This curtain transmutes, also, the far shore's lights to a benevolent string of pearls with nothing behind them and nothing around them. Faced with the houses and shops that make up this string, one so disposed would imagine all the dramas that fill them: persons stranded within the dwindling radii of their potential and ability performing subpar labor for subpar institutions in order to survive, et cetera. This photo, with its shot-silk haze, obliterates all of this: here, the halos are halos only. The one definite building is a small stone chapel at the extreme lower left, at the edge of the curve of the slope to the shore. It's obviously been disused and paganized for many years, but its cemetery is tended. These two facts suggest that it's been closed (maybe in favor of a newer chapel in the city proper, maybe not), and either reused as a storage building or gutted entirely. It therefore holds either years of hymnals, candles, fittings, furniture, books, banal jetsam made strange and glorious by severance from its purpose and consolidation of its severed, purposeless banality (strange and glorious like stacks of ceiling tiles and drywall in an unfinished room or three hundred and twenty hours of security camera footage recorded from a location that no longer exists), or the beatific emptiness of an unfurnished wall under a high ceiling (needs no elaboration).</em>
</p><p>Date of Acquisition:</p><p>
  <em>2 June, 200X</em>
</p><p>Site of Acquisition:</p><p>
  <em>4gazou.org/phot (presumed)</em>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>What we have: a name (or two, or three, or none). Almost fifty images in various formats and qualities (several duplicates). A page of posts - he didn't write much, if he wrote, and what he wrote wasn't good, if it's his, but I'll get to that. A picture of someone who might be him; sharp chin, wet-beach-sand hair in camelid tuft, low equally cameloid cheekbones that make him look a little dopey. Double-pocketed work shirt, jeans - the most affectless, utilitarian outfit known to man. Here is, maybe, the photographer Henry Townshend.</p><p>I first saw his pictures on a forum. It was a seedy kind of place, and still is, even though all the old folks are gone or matured into idiocy either genial or swinish. They don't post his pictures anymore. They probably never much did. Then, I felt that every moment was charged with significance, that the slightest eddy was the crest of an undiscovered world surfacing, through time or space - but there's only the one world, and my memories are only a lurid vein of broken plastic in its ever-growing landfill. No matter how important it seemed at the time, I must constantly remind myself, no one knows what you're talking about. Which is all to say: there was no "Henry Townshend fandom", probably, and those several times I saw his pictures pretty likely number just about the same as the times, in total, that they were posted.</p><p>I remember, or think I remember, a couple of specific posts. Each was a one-off, only <em>Highway</em> or <em>Chapel</em> between cartoon sunsets and breakers of CGI gradient. Only two of mine (<em>Highway</em> and <em>Chapel</em>) are from that site, and only because I saved them all those years ago. Otherwise, I'd never have found them again. No archives cover that period. I don't know if he posted either of them himself. He doesn't seem like the type, but there wasn't so much of a type, back then.</p><p>I don't remember when I first understood that <em>Highway</em> and <em>Chapel</em> were the same hand's work. I think it was after I found <em>Meadow</em> - one of his very few colorful pictures - and realized that I'd seen its flowers before. It took two years of dithering while links rotted before I realized that it was just the churchyard from <em>Chapel</em> and in the lower left of <em>Highway</em>, and that the <em>Highway</em> was probably the ribbon of fog above the chapel. I found <em>Meadow</em> on an aggregator that siphoned the turbulent and besilted depths of chatrooms for material, overwriting itself every day, and so I was never able to find the ultimate source, but after two days, the fourth showed up - <em>Car Park</em>. It was beautiful, and so I became the only Townshend collector I've ever heard about, before I even saw his name.</p><p>I say this as if I have read it and I describe these pictures as if they have proper names given to them by this inferential phantom. They don't, beyond what I've chosen to assemble from their contents and citative bedding. I don't know what, if anything, he actually called each one, or if they're the final takes, or if he considered them good enough to use at all. There exists the possibility that they are tests, or jokes, or B-roll, or garbage, and that Henry Townshend as he chooses to present himself produces the same lurid gazpacho or po-faced monochromatics as every other self-styled photographer.</p><p>He may not exist. <em>Highway</em> is <em>Highway</em>, and Townshend without <em>Highway</em> isn't, and <em>Chapel</em> is the chapel in both. <em>Meadow</em> is just the churchyard with the graves unshot, and <em>Car Park</em>'s lamps and streetlights line up with a few tens of pixels in that string of pearls on <em>Highway</em>'s far shore. <em>Chevelle</em> has the same stone wall at the upper edge as <em>Car Park</em>, <em>Lighthouse</em> is that large gem at the edge of <em>Highway</em>, and so on. All these photos, so connected, compose what I refer to, variously, as the body, the trunk, the nerve.</p><p>Outside this nerve, there are <em>Glass</em> and <em>Pump Station</em>, the <em>Bridge</em> series, the three <em>Fountains</em>, <em>Docks</em> (and <em>Orpheus</em>), <em>Steeple</em>, and the unnamed few others whose status as Townshends I can't verify. This is why I say "almost fifty": at the edge of my collection, at the edge of this nerve, there is a shadow of dubious validation, indefinite activation, an inconstant somatic shade that makes it impossible to say with accuracy exactly how many I've really brought my fingers around. The name - Henry Townshend - was the copyright heading for one of the few attributed versions of <em>Glass</em> I found, but the attribution may have been for the site or its theme, not any particular image. <em>Glass</em> is, moreover and despite my best efforts, linked to the others only stylistically. Therefore, this name, his name, for all I've invested in it, has the weight of wind-chime music.</p><p>The best thing is finding a way to innervate a candidate with total certainty, a quirk of architecture or signage that indisputably reveals its kinship to one of the others. But the more indirect the bond, the more fun, and not for the sake of cruciverbalist cleverness, but for the sense of peril, where if the frame had been a foot higher, or the light a few shades dimmer, or the angle off by a degree, then the clue would be hidden, darkened, out of frame, and the axons' afferent shore unreachable. I like a serious mystery.</p>
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